Women, Work, and God: The Incarnational Politics and Autobiographical Praxis of Victorian Labouring Women

Abstract

My dissertation examines the cross-class relations of Victorian women separated by social status but brought together by their faith in a subversive Christian God who supports female labour. Using original archival research, this project documents the untold story of working-class women and their middle-class allies who challenged patriarchal interpretations of Christian theology and, particularly, the limitations placed on women’s material lives. Drawing on Victorian social thought, feminist autobiography theory, and contemporary body theology, my project pursues two complementary objectives. The first aim is to bring the neglected voices of working-class women into the debates about gender, labour, and cross-class relations that defined the Victorian period. The second is to trace the origins of a feminist “theology from below,” which, born out of the material grittiness of everyday life in the nineteenth century, emphasized the incarnational nature of all bodies, including those labeled dirty, disabled, and perverse. My first two chapters respectively explore the diaries of two well-known Victorian women, Josephine Butler and Hannah Cullwick. Both reconfigure Christian discourses of mission and servitude, seeking not only agency within their positions of subjugation but also new models of relationality. The final two chapters bring together the voices of Jane Andrew (a farm worker) and Ruth Wills (a factory worker) with the writings of fin-de-siècle Christian socialists to construct a politics of redemption based on an ethics of inter-relation that, instead of positioning some bodies as “godly” and others as in need of “saving,” recognizes the immanent divine spirit animating all material life. Using contemporary feminist theology to strengthen the incarnational politics found in these Victorian writings, I argue in favour of bodily transgression—the willingness to walk, talk, touch, and labour in ways that are thought to be “perverse” and “ungodly”—as a legitimate answer to Christ’s call to defy social hierarchies, especially the ones established by capitalist modernity.